The KDE e.V. and GNOME Foundation today announced that they will hold their yearly conferences, Akademy and GUADEC in 2009 in Gran Canaria. The conferences will be separate events, but co-located and hosted by the same organizers, the Cabildo of Gran Canaria and its Secretary of Tourism, Technological Innovation and Foreign Trade.
"The GNOME community is very excited about the co-hosted GUADEC and Akademy" says Behdad Esfahbod, president at the GNOME foundation, "GUADEC has traditionally been a very important chance for our community to meet in person, build great working relationships and make new friends. We're looking forward to having the opportunity to extend those relationships to our KDE colleagues at Akademy/GUADEC." KDE e.V.'s vice-president Adriaan de Groot adds "KDE e.V. is looking forward to a co-located conference, where the GNOME and KDE communities can mingle and cooperate as never before in one location. Gran Canaria is uniquely located at the junction of Europe and Africa, close to the Americas and is a fitting place for a historic 'meet-your-neighbours' conference."

This co-located event will turn Gran Canaria into the capital of Freedesktop.org development for a whole week next summer.

While there were other excellent bids, the KDE e.V. and GNOME foundation have settled on Gran Canaria because of its position as Port to Africa and the excellent circumstances for holding such an event there. Unfortunately, having three proposals, two have to be rejected. The proposals from Tampere in Finland and Coruna in Spain were close contenders. Both foundations would like to thank those organisers for the work they have put into their proposals and encourage them to consider their cities for conferences in future years.

Comments

There were three great bids. I can think of personal reasons to want to go to any three of them; Richard Dale's beer-tour-of-the-island blog helped a bit to form my opinion. The best kind of conference is in a wonderful location that makes life easy and pleasant while keeping the focus on the technical work to be done. I'm confident that GC is a good pick like that.

Anyway, we now have a year to work on our "dead canary" jokes, with all possible variants of pining for the fjords and un-washed geeks in there. I'm looking forward to it.

I would love to see more interaction between gnome and KDE, even more now that gtk3/gnome3 was decided :)

In a perfect world I would made them both:
- use the same system for icon themes (the icon theme would be located in a common place, much like the current menu)
- use each-other themes (hard? yes! possible? so it is). both could have "native" themes more advanced, but a common theme based on png/svg/xml would be awesome!
- commons dialogs: why should I load gtk color picker or file save/load while I am in KDE and vice-versa? (wasn't KDE4 using dcop help this one?)
- agree in a common guideline for programs interface and accessibility. I do not believe this will ever come to happens because of UI different philosophies, but it would be very good for new users that are coming to (l)nix systems if gnome and kde behave in a similar way. Think about using the same keyboard shortcuts, elements position, toolbar icons sizes, etc.
- unite configurations!! made EVERYTHING that is common to both desktop into common configuration files! think about using the same icon sizes, double-single mouse click, keyboard layout, color scheme, theme, panel size...
And not, that would not kill each desktop standard look, because each would use it's OWN default UNTIL the user decides to change.

OK, now that the dream is over, and I am awake, I wish a great party next year for both GUADEC and aKademy. I hope everybody have a lot of fun and speak about interesting new stuff. :)

Either way, getting gtk apps to use KDE themes was done by the KDE side and getting Qt apps to use GTK themes was done by Trolltech. Gnome doesn't do that sort of thing.

Similarly, QtGTK (allowing gtk apps to use KDE dialogs) came from the KDE camp (but seems to have died, though kgtk, also from KDE camp, functions and does the same thing in a rather hacky manner) while Trolltech made it possible to integrate the glib event loop into a qt app for possible use of Gnome dialogs in Qt apps.

Again: both directions, neither done by Gnome. They don't seem interested in the visual side of integrating things at all.

KDE 4.1 can now display native Window$ file dialogs while keeping the KFileDialog interface, I don't see why it wouldn't be technically possible to do the same with GTK+/GNOME dialogs, especially with a Qt built using the GLib event loop. Now whether it is desirable is another question.

> - unite configurations!! made EVERYTHING that is common to both desktop into common configuration files!

I don't expect that to happen.. Simple example: GNOME has one wallpaper for all virtual desktops, KDE allows you to choose one per desktop. If you want to unite settings, you need to agree on every single configuration entry. This is unrealistic.

I do like to see some settings shared. For example, I get requests from users who are using my KDE app (KMess) in GNOME. When they click on an URL, it opens the preferred KDE webbrowser. We currently have to explain them how to go into KControl (or even ~/.kde/share/config/kdeglobals) to fix it. This doesn't feel right to me.

>If you want to unite settings, you need to agree on every single configuration entry. This is unrealistic.

THAT is the sad thing about open-source projects :-(
Why is so difficult to agree such a small thing? Use a simple XML. You can have both ways, gnome could read only desktop #1 option, kde could read all of them. It's just a simple middle of the way solution users want!

It is difficult because it is *not* as small thing.
Agreeing on several hundrets of settings, their keys/names, value types, default values, overwrite rules (i.e. system vs. user values), etc. is not something "small".

If the Gnome3 UI is going to be all about tabs (see planet.gnome.org) and the KDE4 UI is all about widgets and containments, what are the odds that a marriage of the two projects will put tabs on the desktop?

This is false. The island with most area and population[1][2] is Tenerife. Even more, the capital city is shared between Las Palmas and Santa Cruz de Tenerife. So I don't see where you took this information.

PS: Instead that, you can said that Las Palmas is the largest city of the island.

Well in my opinion, Tenerife is best admired from a distance, by climbing up one of Gran Canaria's excellent mountains, such as the Roque Nublo (biggest isn't necessarily prettiest), and looking across the 'Mar del Nublos' (sea of clouds) at Tenerife's Mount Teide which still has snow on the peak in early summer. So no need to actually go to Tenerife to do that, and it would be well worth doing if you have some spare time while attending the conference.

I'm not sure what point you are trying to make. To put on two events with 500 attendees each at the same time without adequate funding makes no sense at all. Even then, it will still involve a lot of volunteer effort to make it happen.

The sponsors of the event are allowing the people who go to further their projects and improve collaboration, and I can assure you that there won't be advertising breaks by the Gran Canaria tourist board or Nokia in between the conference talks.

First of all, thanks to everybody for bringing such a big event to Gran Canaria, Canary Islands. As you can see, eventhough we are a little group of 7 islands, each one of us thinks its islands is the best one. It happens everywere.

Since this time GUADEC and Akademy will take place at the same time, at the same place, we will need an extra effort to prepare common activities and hacking sessions. This needs previous work so the event can be productive. Whatever you guys need, please let us know.

This event should be also different in the implication of the local community. Since we have strong sponsorship that are going to help us a lot, we will have enough resources to organice courses and other stuff so more local newbies get into free software in general and to GNOME and KDE in particular. We will need help from KDE and GNOME developers in this job.

If this two extra objetives are accomplished, Gran Canaria Desktop Meeting: GUADEC+KDE 2009 will be a success.